Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

2 9 2Islam i n World Cult u r e sWhile living in Chicago in the 1920s, Drew established the Moorish ScienceTemple, the first indigenous African American group to claim that blacks wereboth biologically and historically Muslims. Producing a complicated historicalgenealogy based on scriptures in the Hebrew Bible, Drew argued that blackpeople were racially linked to Asiatic peoples, whose natural religion was Islam.He took the title of Noble Drew Ali and became known as a prophet. Refusingto call himself “Negro,” “black,” or “colored,” Noble Drew insisted thatblack Americans were members of the Moorish nation from Africa. His “HolyKoran of the Moorish Science Temple” (1927), a document entirely differentfrom the Qur’an revealed to the Prophet Muhammad of Arabia, preached theimportance of moral behavior, industrious work habits, and social solidarityand promised that the secrets of Moorish Science would bring earthly and divinesalvation to persons of African descent. Many of the Islamic symbols thatDrew adopted, including his fez and his title “Noble,” came not from the Islamicculture of immigrants but from the black Shriners. In fact, the MoorishScience Temple was probably more a child of black fraternal organizationsand African American popular culture than it was of Old World Islam.And yet the Moorish Science Temple is central to an understanding of thedevelopment of Islam in the United States, since it was the first indigenousAfrican American organization to propagate the idea that black people were,by nature, Muslims. It was an idea that Elijah Muhammad and his Nation of Islamwould spread around the country. The Nation of Islam, the best-knownAfrican American Muslim organization in the history of the United States, beganaround 1930 in the Detroit area, where W. D. Fard, a mysterious peddlerprobably of Turkish or Iranian origins, promoted the idea that Islam was theoriginal religion of the “Blackman.” One of his followers was Elijah Poole, ablack migrant from Georgia. By 1934, Fard had disappeared, apparently leavingPoole in charge. Poole, who became known as Elijah Muhammad, believedFard to be God, or Allah, in person; he thought himself his messenger.The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, as he was addressed by his followers,taught that blacks must seek economic and political independence from whiteAmerica, return to their original religion of Islam, and abandon immoral“slave behaviors” such as eating pork, drinking liquor, and fornicating. In additionto a message of black nationalism and strict moral discipline, ElijahMuhammad offered his followers an apocalyptic myth that explained blacksuffering and promised black redemption. Called “Ya c u b ’s history,” the mythtaught that blacks were the original people of earth, living a glorious existenceuntil a mad scientist named Yacub betrayed them by genetically engineering awhite man. The white man was violent by nature and eventually overpoweredand enslaved the black man, who had weakened himself by abandoning thetrue religion of Islam. But God would not leave his chosen people helpless.Appearing in the person of W. D. Fard, he commissioned the messenger to